...Would someone want to have a pickup that is magnetically out-of-phase, and that looks mounted upside-down?
It must be some kind of a fetish, a flash-in-the-pan momentary fad, some kind of gratuitous excercise.
Well - it turns out it ain't so.
One of our dear friends, a professional LA guitarist who we'll name simply "Kevin" - a BIG Nik Huber fan (has 6 Dolphin guitars, by the latest count) asked me already last year (august IIRC) if we would do a set of "greenies" to go into his old rosewood necked GMP singlecut.
I had read the old interview with Jol Dantzig (click here to read it) - I was familiar with it because it was widely discussed on the Hamer Fan Club Board ("Kevin" and I are both members). I always thought it would be a cool tweak to do but never really put my head to it.
My answer was - Sure! - and I got Harry to turn on the winding machines (he actually switched his grey matter in overdrive and thought about the implications of the whole thing, before winding something stupid).
Kevin got a set of Harry's Classic PAFs, uncovered, in black. The neck p.up was turned "wrong" and the magnet had been flipped around.
He wasn't satisfied with the first wind - rosewood necks can be a bitch - so he asked for another set. This time we used the VIN neck pickup and, lo and behold, the Tone was there, according to Kev. August 2005: Peter Green's out-of-phase tone makes the comeback!
Now of course, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon... but I think that we wouldn't be where we are if Kevin hadn't asked us to wind him his "greenies".
What's so special about the whole thing, you will ask?
Well - first of all, the screws are sensing the string in a different position, they're hearing a different quality of harmonics. Just try picking the harmonics on the Vth fret and then on the IVth and tell me what you hear.
Second - the phase isn't reversed by means of some fonky wiring trick, it's reversed because the magnetic North and South are reversed with respect to the bridge pickup. Sounds "different".
So what happens is that in the middle position you hear a big volume drop.
Uh-oh.
But think of it - it could be very useful.
Think of your amp dimed to a nice solo level on the bridge p.up.
Switch to the mid position and you have a much less distorted tone. It has a "quack" to it which can be very interesting if you're into ZZ Top, for example - or Peter Green / Gary Moore, of course ;-)
Roll one of the volumes down and your overall volume goes up. What the heck?? Well, you're reducing the amount of phase cancellation so obviously your volume will increase. If you have two volume controls - try putting a linear taper volume pot on the bridge p.up.
Why?
Because when you roll down the volume, the decrease is much more gradual than with the logarithmic pots; you will find some very interesting positions where strange, shimmering or "hollow" tones will appear. This is very hard to do with a log pot, as just a very little turn yields a significant signal decrease.
